While many people think of cancer as a modern plague, researchers continue to find examples of tumors in animals much older than our own species. Discovery of bone cancer in a very early member of the turtle lineage, which lived 240 million years ago, reveals new information about the disease and just how long it’s been a scourge to living things.

The aggressive osteosarcoma was found in the femur of Pappochelys rosinae, a roughly 240 million-year-old reptile. Though you might mistake P